Riots in London

Rue, can you get your mates to leave JD Sports well alone please?

Suddenly, public sector workers are flavour of the month.

The correspondence column of today's METRO is full of messages from police officers thanking members of the public for their unsolicited, spontaneous support in the wake of the riots.

Yesterday's METRO front page quoted approvingly RMT Chairman Bob Crow's condemnation of the proposed 13% hike in rail fares. Suddenly, he's no longer Public Enemy Number One, but a respected member of society whose opinions matter.

And I've noticed myself a distinct sea-change in the attitude of members of the travelling public over the last week: smiles rather than snarls; compliments rather than abuse.

It can't possibly last, but we might as well enjoy it while it does.

More words from the ultraliberal profit driven media:

This miserable life of drugs, loitering and weapons in neighborhoods which were devastated by the policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and never fixed by Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, is the fate of those dubbed "NEETs" in the UK. It stands for "not in education, employment or training", and there are about 1.2 million people who fit the description. They rule their local areas under the law of the jungle, with a deep sense of uselessness in a world where almost every recreational activity costs money; money which they don't have.

Louis James is one of these "NEETs", and reporters from the New York Times spoke to him after he had stolen a pullover worth 120 pounds during the looting. James, 19, lives in North London. The state pays his rent, and he gets 77 pounds jobless benefit every two weeks. He has given up looking for work, he left school at 15 and has only been able to read for the past three years. His mother has barely enough money for herself and her other children, and his father, a heroin addict, is dead.

"No one has ever given me a chance; I am just angry at how the whole system works," James said. "They give me just enough money so that I can eat and watch TV all day."

The values that once made Britain an example for the rest of the world were never instilled in James: personal responsibility, individuality, common sense, stoicism, understatement, discipline. Who could have taught him them? His parents? His friends? The elites, who shut themselves off in expensive private schools, then get 70 percent of the well-paid jobs and would probably prefer to visit a leper colony than Tottenham?

The true public tone of the past 30 years has been set by one man: Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul who has shaped modern Britain more than any British politician, businessman or intellectual. Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher together broke the power of the trade unions in the 1980s and forged ahead with the liberalization of the markets. Flanked by the resurgent financial sector in the City of London, Murdoch made greed socially acceptable and turned the Britons into a nation of shoppers in which only one thing counted: "Loads of Money."

Thousands mourn riot car victims

August 19, 2011


The coffins of Haroon Jahan, Shazad Ali and Abdul Musavir are loaded into their hearses before a private burial at Handsworth Cemetery

Thousands of mourners turned out for the funerals of three "precious gemstones" who died as they tried to protect shops and homes from looters.

Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, died in the early hours of August 10 after they were struck by a car during riots in the Winson Green area of Birmingham.

At an open-air prayer service attended by more than 20,000 people, the three victims were hailed as martyrs. Mourners comforted each other, some wiping away tears but most remaining calm and stoical.

Scholar Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, who spoke at the ceremony, said: "They made an example of how a Muslim should be and what Islam is. These three people are martyrs and the best we can do for them is to pray for them and for ourselves - to pray for our community."

Saqib Majid, a cousin of Shazad Ali and Abdul Musavir, addressed the crowds at the service in Winson Green's Summerfield Park.

He said: "Words are too little to express the sorrow and pain felt by our household during the past week and we are still very much in shock.

"Our boys were rare precious gemstones of people that would have no hesitation in helping another in their hardships. They were loving, bubbly, caring and very brave family men. A very tragic week it has been, one in which we cannot even come to terms with our losses."

He said some of the victims' peers had been "deeply angered" by the circumstances of their deaths, but urged: "We should, as Muslim youth, channel this anger in a non-violent manner."

Many people in the crowd sported T-shirts printed with the names of the three victims, beneath the heading "My Brothers". Others wore shirts bearing the words "Gone but not forgotten."

Mr Jahan's father, Tariq Jahan, who had called for calm and peace in the community in the days immediately after his son's death, spoke briefly to thank everyone for coming to the service.

AOL

Next flashpoint: the Notting Hill carnival?

The world was shocked. London venerable, staid, the quintessence of civilization seemed to descend into savagery. For several days, England's capital was convulsed in paroxysms of random, degenerate violence.

My concern about London had a personal dimension. My daughter lives there. Naturally, when we saw the news reports, my wife and I checked up on her. London is a huge, sprawling metropolis, and we were relieved to know that the violence stayed away from the places where she lives and works.

While grateful for our daughter's safety, we, like millions of others around the world, were saddened by the mindless violence, appalled by the orgy of theft, disgusted by the pointless destruction of property, and sickened by the sheer wantonness with which the perpetrators contemptuously violated the fundamental rights of others. In the perennial contest between savagery and civilization, depravity and decency, the wrong side held the upper hand for a while.

What happened?

According to some American news outlets, the violence was a cry of protest against "unjust" cuts in government spending. A leading French newspaper described it as a rebellion against a corrupt society. Apparently, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to channel the '60s and clothe acts of criminal violence in the respectable garb of fighting for a worthy cause.

My daughter and her fellow Londoners say, "Rubbish!"

London has protests "all the time," says my daughter. In fact, her workplace shuts down periodically as a precautionary measure when those protesting for gay rights, student rights, worker rights, Palestinian rights, etc. march by. The recent violence wasn't a protest.

Nor would my daughter characterize what happened as a riot. I remember the Detroit riots that happened a few miles from my home in 1967. Though the looting was unjustified, the Detroit riots were fueled by long-unresolved racial issues. (Some have cited a confrontation in which a London policeman shot an armed man to death as the flashpoint, but the localized reaction to that incident was unrelated to the outbreak of criminality in multiple areas in the city.)

What happened in London was malicious hooliganism, nothing more. Vandalism wasn't confined to a particular demographic. Rich and not-rich (you can't call them poor when they were well-fed and wearing "in" clothes), "mixed-color" (British term) and white, male and female, young and not-so-young (men in their 30s were well-represented in the mix) -- all participated in the crime wave.

Hooligans burned down multi-generation family businesses for kicks. Looters and thieves used Twitter and other social media to plot robberies, simply because they wanted to have things without paying. The most depraved attacked firefighters who were trying to douse blazes. It was mindless, perverse violence-for-the-sake-of-violence, nothing more.

Initially, some Londoners wondered what they might have done wrong. It is a morally fuzzy age when innocent people consider taking partial responsibility for the criminal behavior of others.

That self-doubting and potentially self-destructive attitude vanished instantly when Londoners learned that some hooligans had tried to torch the hospital where the most severely ill children were housed. Within hours, stores in London were sold out of golf clubs, cricket bats, and other potential weapons. London police loaded up with plastic bullets, and -- presto! -- the crime spree stopped.

An insightful perspective on this outburst of violence comes from Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, the film version of which was one of the leading movies of 1971. In lurid, vivid, unforgettable images, director Stanley Kubrick retold Burgess' story of feral English lads who roamed the countryside looking for mischief -- a brawl here, an orgy there, a rape and (oops!) an accidental murder over there.

The story has these criminal rowdies coming forth from homes where mom and dad are passive, far too preoccupied elsewhere to teach their kids right from wrong. If no parents or churches or schools inculcate in youth an internal moral compass of the "thou shalt nots" of the Mosaic Decalogue and the Golden Rule of Christianity, then they unleash on society lost souls, adrift on a sea of moral anarchy, devoid of the respect for the rights of others that enables a society to cohere and function.

How should we deal with these morally untutored individuals, ready to commit crime in response to their infantile "I wants" or in petulant retaliation to an adult world that didn't love them enough to teach them about the most important things in life? A Clockwork Orange explores that difficult question provocatively and profoundly. An interesting undercurrent in the story is the portrayal of the State as something potentially more awful than morally deformed punks. The novel and movie were eerily prescient about the problem of law-breaking hooligans, very timely today.

The wanton thuggery in London showed major cracks in the foundation of Western civilization. Relearning the art of parental discipline, and re-establishing the primacy of the moral code upon which Western civilization was built, are monumental but necessary tasks. I hope we aren't too late.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

And I thought it was because of criminals !

“Deep Cuts in Social Services” By Conservatives Led to London Riots says London-based reporter Ravi Somaiya

“Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services. At the same time, a widely held disdain for law enforcement here, where a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse, has only intensified through the drumbeat of scandal that has racked Scotland Yard in recent weeks and led to the resignation of the force’s two top commanders.

...Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months...As the budget cuts take hold, risk of unemployment increases and social measures like youth projects are sacrificed, Mr. Beech said, and ‘all logic says there will be an increase in antisocial behavior.’”

Posted to the WWW on September 6th, 2011

You Don’t Say: Three-Quarters of People Charged Over UK Riots Have Criminal Records

You may remember how, following last month’s riots in London and elsewhere, liberal politicians and commentators dismissed claims that the violence and looting were acts of wanton criminality as simplistic right-wing rhetoric. They insisted that the riots were, in fact, an understandable if regrettable protest by the poor and disenfranchised against the Conservative government’s austerity measures; another popular liberal theme was that the rioters were impressionable individuals who’d been driven to break the law by the bad example set by greedy bankers.

Turns out the simplistic right-wing rhetoricians were on to something: it’s emerged that more than three-quarters of the adults convicted of involvement in the riots have criminal records. The revelation that most of the rioters were at best repeat offenders and at worst career criminals, rather than the desperate poor rising up against their out-of-touch rulers, will come as no surprise to those who noted that the looters were stealing TVs, iPhones and sports shoes, rather than bread and warm clothing.

However, it doesn’t appear that the government is drawing the appropriate lessons from these figures: Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke thinks they highlight the failure of the UK’s penal system to adequately rehabilitate offenders. While that may be true for some of those involved, it’s also the case that for many criminals, their experience of the system – short prison sentences, or ‘community’ sentences in lieu of prison – isn’t sufficiently disagreeable to dissuade them from committing further crimes. It’s also highly likely that the more hardened law-breakers involved in the riots are incapable of being reformed – whether by tough sentences or by the most sympathetic of rehabilitation programmes – because they are, to use a word that’s not terribly fashionable in discussions of these issues, evil.

Tinkering with the criminal justice system won’t do much to prevent future riots. Fortunately, the government is also committed to education and welfare reforms intended to address the societal and family breakdowns that have created what Mr Clarke, in a rare moment of clarity, called the “feral underclass” responsible for most of the violence and destruction.

And let’s hear no more nonsense about spending cuts.

Made in Britain by Gavin James Bower – review

Gavin James Bower tells a poignant tale of the 'feral underclass'

Jenn Ashworth
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 September 2011 22.55 BST


For one of Bower's teenage protagonists, 'there's an opportunity to study in Leeds – a glittering city that might as well be a continent away'. Photograph: Don McPhee

There might never be a better time for a novel that gives voice to Kenneth Clarke's "feral underclass". Made in Britain introduces us to three young people on the brink of adult life, each desperate to escape from the depressed east Lancashire town where the book is set. These are troubled teenagers; victims of a society they are powerless to influence and who, in turn, mete out petty and not so petty injustices to the world that made them.


Made in Britain
by Gavin James Bower

Russell is a sensitive romantic who writes love poems to a dead girl. His mother is depressed, his father walked out on them years ago, and though there's an opportunity to study in Leeds – a glittering city that might as well be a continent away – he's not sure he can cope with himself, never mind the rest of the world. Charlie is cleverer than he seems but is drawn into the murky world of drugs and crime, led by a desire for money. By tracing his interactions with the Asian gang he becomes embroiled in, Bower shows us Charlie's need for respect, friendship and a stand-in family whose loyalty and even love are a world apart from anything he experiences at home with his alcoholic father and cowed mother. Hayley is not quite as clever or canny; when she grows up, she wants to be famous. Bower portrays her vulnerability so well that the conclusion to her story, though inevitable, is desperately sad. Hayley's memories of her dead mother – the woman who advised her to stuff her face while she could, and then go out into the world and "earn her reward" – are among the most moving in the book.

Bower succeeds in making Charlie, Russell and Hayley distinct, memorable and engaging. But Made in Britain is at its least interesting when it attempts to provide explanations for its characters' actions. Bower crams his short novel with "issues" – closed libraries, Chinese manufacturing and its impact on the industrial north, alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, the cult of celebrity, drugs, teen single parents, racism and gang violence, school bullying and suicide. These complex issues are listed rather than examined, used as a backdrop rather than unpicked through action and event. This is especially so when Charlie's and Hayley's fathers make their set speeches – seen through the eyes of their disenfranchised children, these political statements seem even more didactic.

These are small criticisms of a book that captures not only what we already know about such "Everytowns" – lack of prospects, casual racism, boredom, the fact that the credit crunch hasn't made any difference because "this town's been in recession for twenny years, and what's anyone done about it?" – but also what we don't know, or need reminding of: the private terror of taking your place in a world that has already destroyed your parents, and the hopeless beauty of the familiar and forgotten landscape that traps you. "I'm up the canal, and can see the whole town from where I'm sitting. The old mills to my left, the rows of terraced houses boarded up now on that side of town, and the council blocks where Trafalgar Flats used to be, before they knocked them down. Straight ahead's the new bus station, lit up in purple."

That distant view of a lit-up bus station is the nearest most of Bower's characters come to real escape. Made in Britain does not wear its political interests lightly, but what makes the book special is its portrayal of the particular fates of three teenagers who stand for a generation while being utterly and completely themselves.

Jenn Ashworth's latest novel is Cold Light (Sceptre).

Rioting is the choice of young people with nothing to lose

Reading the Riots leaves us with a big question: do we have the energy to give these people the stake they do not have

Rowan Williams [Archbishop of Canterbury]

guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 December 2011 20.59 GMT


A masked man walks past a burning car during the riots in Hackney, east London. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The Guardian's Reading the Riots reports left me with a sensation of enormous sadness. So much of what is recorded here reflects lives in which anger and depression are almost the default setting, thanks to of a range of frustrations and humiliations. Too many of these young people assume they are not going to have any ordinary, human, respectful relationships with adults – especially those in authority, the police above all. Too many inhabit a world in which the obsession with "good" clothes and accessories – against a backdrop of economic insecurity or simple privation – creates a feverish atmosphere where status falls and rises as suddenly and destructively as a currency market: good lives are lives where one's position within a fierce Darwinian hierarchy of style is temporarily secure. Too many feel they have nothing to lose because they are told practically from birth that they have no serious career opportunities.

To ask if the riots were "political" or "opportunistic" is pointless. These are not people who live complacently in a culture of entitlement, nor are they, for the most part, committed criminals. Neither are they heroes of democratic protest, Britain's answer to Tahrir Square. They are people who have vague but strong longings for something like secure employment, and no idea where to look for it; who on the whole want to belong, and live in a climate where they are taken seriously as workers, as citizens – and as needy individuals; and who have got used to being pushed to the margins and told that they are dispensable.

So there is a political agenda in the wider sense: about how we organise our life together in society. But because many of these people are damaged – by unstable family settings, by education delivered in almost impossible conditions, by what is felt as constant suspicion and discrimination – their way of releasing tension is destructive and chaotic. There is no point in being sentimental: they make appallingly bad, selfish, short-term choices. The question is why such choices seem natural or unavoidable to so many. We may well wince when some describe how the riots brought them a feeling of intense joy, liberation, power. But we have to ask what kind of life it is in which your emotional highs come from watching a shop torched or a policeman hit by a brick.

Nearly three years ago the Children's Society produced its Good Childhood report, a careful analysis of what young people thought constituted a nurturing environment to grow up in. Its conclusions were devastatingly simple. Young people need love. They need a dependable background for their lives, emotionally and socially; a background that helps them take certain things for granted so that they know they don't have to fight ceaselessly for recognition. We should be keeping a sharp eye on working practices that undermine this, and asking how law and society reinforce the right kinds of family stability by training in parenting skills as well as high quality out-of-school activity and care. We should be challenging an educational philosophy too absorbed in meeting targets to shape character. And we should look long and hard at the assumptions we breed into our children about acquisition and individual material profit.

The authors of that report boldly refused to be fashionably negative about the younger generation, but they did not pretend that all was well. Last summer's events will have tempted many of them to say "I told you so". But when the endemic problems they identified are combined with the impact of massive massive economic hopelessness and the prospect of record levels of youth unemployment, it isn't surprising if we see volatile, chaotic and rootless young people letting off their frustration in the kind of destructive frenzy we witnessed in August.

And the hard conclusion is that there is no one root cause that we can deal with in a finite time scale. Solutions will have to emerge slowly as we try to redirect a whole culture. Some of the elements of this process are not hard to identify. When we think about spending cuts, national and local, we have to build in "youth-testing": what will their measurable impact be on children and young people? And if that impact is problematic, what will offset it? The idea that cutting the provision of youth services is ever a true economy – never mind the ethics of it – should be (but isn't always in practice) manifestly indefensible.

We have to support our hard-pressed educational professionals in creating and sustaining environments in which character is shaped and imagination nourished, in which we not only raise aspirations but also offer some of the tools to cope with disappointment and failure in a mature way – an education of the emotions is badly needed in a culture of often vacuous aspiration.

It's interesting to see how few of those interviewed by the project identified poor parenting as a cause of the trouble. You may say, 'Well, they wouldn't, would they?' But that is to miss the point. Many had a healthy respect, not to say alarm, for how their parents might judge them. Some admitted that if they were parents they would feel as their own parents would. But whatever they had imbibed at home was regularly undermined by what the wider society presented – including the spectacle, in a good many settings last August, of adults inciting younger people to join them in looting or violence. How do we as a society back up good lessons in the home and show that we corporately want what a good family wants – mutual attention and affirmation, stability and emotional literacy, a sense of value that doesn't depend on accessories?

Demonising volatile and destructive young people doesn't help; criminalising them wholesale reinforces a lot of what produces the problem in the first place. Of course crime needs punishment, and limits of acceptable behaviour have to be set. The youth justice system has a good record in restorative justice that brings people up sharp against the human consequences of what they have done. We have the tools for something other than vindictive or exemplary penalties.

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what's needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers.